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China's economic slowdown is not as severe as it seems
China recently announced that real growth last year was 8.1 percent, which will almost certainly turn out to be the fastest of any major economy. But much of the analysis in news media in the West has focused on the marked slowdown on a quarterly basis, to only 4 percent in the last calendar quarter. However, this approach is misleading. It fails to consider China's highly unusual pattern of growth in 2020, which was marked by a sharp decline in economic output in the first quarter because of COVID-19 lockdowns. But China quickly brought the pandemic under control, and growth resumed in the second quarter of 2020 and ... (full story)